DVDs, 10/23.

It's a good week for Kino International, which has released, for starters, Anthony Asquith's rediscovered and restored A Cottage on Dartmoor, "a legitimate revelation," according to Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "A kind of modern-Gothic psycho-thriller that is astonishingly frank for its day, Asquith's movie manifests what old-school movieheads have long said about silent-vs-sound cinema - that had sound come along a few years later, rather than in the silent-renaissance year of 1927, then film itself would've reached heights of expressive power it didn't attain for years afterwards (if it ever has)."

"The Odessa Steps are back, seemingly in their bloody entirety, in the new DVD of Battleship Potemkin that Kino International is releasing today, and so are the squirming maggots and countless other details that have been excised over the years," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. Of all the versions out there, for now, and "for visual and aural quality, the Kino disc is now the one to beat."

Updated through 10/25.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Warner's release of its three-disc Jazz Singer package, a debate rolls on. "How to deal with the significant 'racist relics' of our culture, the things that would have better never been made?" asks Premiere's Glenn Kenny, arguing that, above all, willful forgetfulness won't rewrite history.

Tim Lucas watches The Graduate, newly released as "a splendid two-disc set, with the best-looking transfer the film has ever had on home video, numerous supplementary trailers and featurettes... and, best of all, two compellingly listenable audio commentaries."

"To hell with equivocation or beating around the bush: Terrence Malick's 1978 Days of Heaven is the greatest film ever made," declares Nick Schager at Slant, and Criterion's release is a "DVD fit for a masterpiece."

"Xperimental Eros, a DVD compiled by Noel Lawrence and released by Other Cinema, chronicles the resurgence of raunch in avant-garde cinema," notes Brian L Frye in the Stranger.

"Criterion's new DVD release of Mala Noche doesn't try to shed much contemporary light on [Gus] Van Sant's first feature, instead pitching it as a 'time capsule,'" writes Paul Schrodt at the House Next Door. "As an introduction to the New Queer Cinema movement, it is. But Mala Noche has also given modern gay films (from Mysterious Skin to Hellbent) a language through which to frame gay existence."

PopMatters: "TV That Should Be on DVD."

Online listening tip. Movie Geeks United! celebrate Stanley Kubrick. Via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.

DVD roundups: Bryant Frazer, DVD Talk and Peter Martin at Cinematical and Nathaniel R.

Updates, 10/24: Days of Heaven seems to spark this sort of reaction. "Objectivity be damned: no movie has ever been shot more rapturously," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

"Warner Home Video's 23-DVD Pedro Infante collection is largely a tribute to the many mediocrities that this phenomenally popular singer-actor made during the 1940s and 50s," writes J Hoberman. What follows are notes on films by Luis Buñuel, some already out on DVD, others on the way, and on Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Once again: "As much as I love watching Days of Heaven, I dread having to write about it. The experience of seeing Terrence Malick's masterpiece invariably leaves me awestruck and overwhelmed, and gushing is not criticism." This time it's Elbert Ventura at Reverse Shot.

Update, 10/25: Raoul Hernandez in the Austin Chronicle on Days of Heaven: "All classical styles of painting can be found in the lionized 1978 film, pastels from the south of France tilting into Hopper's Midwestern glow before darkening into Dutch. Oils, acrylics, watercolors, they all pool together: Bergman, Bertolucci, Fellini, Kubrick."

Posted by dwhudson at October 23, 2007 8:52 AM